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Compte enrere

6 de set. 2017

4 General

Spain refused to allow Catalan police to belong to Europol and
to be therefore able to directly share intelligence data. This was in
June 2017. The European police union Eurocop warned that their exclusion can compromise security throughout Europe.

Time to demand explanations for the Barcelona Terrorist Attacks

Four months ago Barcelona suffered a terrorist attack but, unfortunately, part of the story remains in the shadows. Let’s start at the beginning...

...Abdelbaki Es Satty was a moroccan imam with previous radical activities that was recruited as an informer by the Spanish Intelligence Agency (Centro Nacional de Inteligencia or CNI). That cooperation prevented Es Satty to be expelled by a judge although he had been involved in drug trafficking.

Es Satty was approached by a Spanish neonazi in order to get weapons to attack a Jewish publishing company and kidnap a Jewish manager in a Catalan bank. The plot was dismantled in 2015.

Being Es Satty a clear risk to Jewish communities, the Israeli intelligence service placed him under a special electronic surveillance.

Es Satty recruited a cell of young people without previous radical activities for a new terrorist plot. They got a a house in Alcanar, a southern Catalan village, and started to buy materials to prepare the explosives. The plan seemed to be a strike against the always crowded Sagrada Familia church, a tourist hot spot, with a truck full of explosives.

Meanwhile, Israeli surveillance, unaware that Es Satty was an informant, concluded that his patterns of activity matched to those of an inminent terrorist attack.

Israeli intelligence service issued warnings of the terrorist preparations to both the Spanish Intelligence Agency and the Spanish Homeland Department. American Intelligence was also informed of the threat.

After Spanish government’s lack of effective response and fearing an upcoming attack, the Israeli Intelligence Service sent operatives to Barcelona to protect key buildings of the local Jewish community...

The real question here is: Why did the Spanish Government refuse to act despite several warnings of an impending terrorist attack coming from authoritative sources? Was such inaction motivated by the current political problems between Catalonia and the Spanish Government?...

See this summary of Spain's actions and strategy immediately after 17 August: https://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/aixi-va-engegar-loperacio-mediatica-contra-lindependentisme-poques-hores-despres-del-17-a/